There may be a slight amount of truth to this, but not worth spending money on interest. If you carry no balance across the reporting date, it reports $0 balance. If you are fully paid up the next month too, they will not bother to report - and after several non-reports, you can appear inactive; even if you have been spending and paying every month. Utilization is only counted for the current month, so whenever you do have a balance that isn't zero again, that new utilization will affect your score, accordingly, temporarily. Meanwhile, your score generally trends up (but you won't see the changes until they report). However, at least with Capital One, you get some time to pay after the cycle ends but before interest is added, so you can show a balance to get reported, and then still pay the balance to $0 without interest. This does two insignificant positive things: shows regular activity (prevents the appearance of inactivity), and provides the most frequent updates for monitoring. There is a theory that regular reported activity expedites score growth (maybe, a little), but at the very least this practice may indirectly help prevent potential drops in score. It's probably negligible.